Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

The second ring cost more than the first, and the third promised to cost more than that.

Xuan felt the qi trickling back into him as they climbed, a little more with every street, and he hoarded it like a man who’d learned the hard way what running dry felt like. He could fight again. He made himself remember, each time the urge rose to end a thing fast, that the card which ended things fast was gone, spent on a gatehouse floor, and there’d be no drawing it twice tonight.

[ Good, you remember, ] Mira said. [ You’ve got your hands back, not a miracle. Fight like the first, not the second.]

The loyalists had picked their ground better up here. They gave Xuan a plaza with a dry fountain in the middle of it and a gatehouse arch on the far side, both packed with men, and a real blade planted in the mouth of the arch - a loyalist cultivator a full head taller than the rest, Golden Core by the weight of him, set there like he meant to hold the gap until the hill came down.

Xuan met the plaza the way he couldn’t have an hour ago. Awakening Dragon to read the first two who came at him, low and patient, letting them commit before he moved. Coiling Dragon to turn a spear out of line and open the man carrying it. Then Twin Dragon Strike, one cut folding into a second nobody saw arrive, and both of them dropped. It was good to have his hands under him again. He didn’t let it last.

The big one in the arch was another matter entirely. He was Golden Core and fresh, and he cut down two of Bo Ren’s guard before anyone reached him, and Xuan felt the whole advance snag on him the way water catches on a stone.

Xuan didn’t go for him. He had a better blade for that.

"Wuji."

He didn’t need to say the rest. Yan Wuji was already crossing the plaza, and this time Xuan let himself watch, because what the Pavilion’s golden son had turned into since the gatehouse was worth watching even when it put a chill in him.

The big man was good. He met Yan Wuji’s first vertical and turned it and grinned like someone who’d finally found a real fight, and that grin lasted exactly as long as it took him to work out that the boy across from him wasn’t fighting a duel. Yan Wuji took him apart the way you take apart a lock. Every stroke asked a question, and every answer cost the big man a little more room and a little more skin, until the questions ran out of places to go and the last one went through his throat.

Yan Wuji stood over him a moment, breathing hard, and Xuan watched him wait for the thing that never came - the feeling that this one, at last, had been enough. It wasn’t. Jin was still dead. The big man was just dead too.

The net had been fraying the whole climb, and Xuan had been pretending not to notice.

He noticed now, because Xinhua stopped being able to hide it. She’d woken the wards with her blood, and she carried them with her as they went, the whole penned weight of the lower city held on a bond that ran through her, and the higher they climbed the more it cost her to keep the leash short. By the top of the third ring she was fighting with one hand and holding the net with the rest of herself, and it showed - blood at her nose she kept wiping away, a tremor in the arm that had nothing to do with swordwork, her jaw locked against something none of them could see.

"They’re pulling," she said, when Xuan got close enough to hear. Her voice had gone tight and careful, the voice of a person carrying a full cup up a moving stair. "At the bottom they hold fine. Up here they fight me. Something’s on the other end of this, Xuan, and it gets stronger the closer we climb. It wants them off the leash."

"Then don’t die keeping every last one on it." He put a hand on her shoulder, brief. "Hold what you can. Let the ones up here go if you have to. We’ll answer loose ones with steel."

"That’s the part that scares me," she said.

She was right to be scared, and she was also, Xuan saw, winning a second fight he had no part in. Every ring they took, more of the imperial soldiers set their weapons down rather than die for a prince who’d left them behind. They knelt when they saw her. Not for the sword on her hip, but for the name, and for the fact that she’d walked back into a dead city to earn it. Xuan let her have that one. It was hers, and it was doing more to take the hill than his steel was.

They were most of the way up the third ring, in a colonnaded street with the palace wall finally near enough to see the cracks running through it, when the thing Xinhua had been dreading came true.

One of the wardens came off the leash. Xuan felt it before he saw it, felt the net rip and Xinhua gasp beside him as a thread tore clean out of her grip, and then it came around the end of the colonnade, and it was wrong.

It stood half again as tall as the grey things in the streets, its plates black instead of dull, and it didn’t move with the patient blind sweep of the penned ones. There was purpose in it. It hadn’t wandered into the street. It had come looking. Its crowded skull swung once, unhurried, and settled on the knot of them the way a hound settles on a scent it was handed, and Xuan understood in his gut that the net had never been holding this one at all.

[ That one was never on your net, ] Mira said, low and certain. [ The penned ones are foot soldiers. This is something that gives foot soldiers their orders. And it just got pointed at you.]

Xinhua was already gray in the face from holding what was left of the leash. Bo Ren’s guard was strung out behind them down a street they’d bled for. And the black thing at the end of the colonnade took one step toward them, then another, in no hurry at all, because whatever had let it loose knew exactly how little stood between it and the people it had been sent to find.

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